The Man Who Inspired A Photographic Portrait Of America

During the 1940s, he sent a corps of 30 photographers around the country for Standard Oil Co. (New Jersey) as part of the largest private photography project ever undertaken in this country.

The 67,000 images Stryker collected for the project chronicle what we have come to call, with nostalgic hindsight, America`s last age of innocence. The pictures show families gathered for dinner, oilfield laborers, boom towns belching smoke and idyllic back roads. They capture the mood at the stores, bars and churches lining the main streets of towns such as Tomball, Tex., and Purcell, Okla. The people in these photographs exude a sense of pride and confidence in a country recovered from the Depression, victorious after a great war and not yet rocked by the Vietnam era.

Nearly 200 of the photographs are on display at the Chicago Historical Society through March 17 as part of an exhibit called, appropriately, ``Roy Stryker: U.S.A., 1943-1950.``

Stryker never picked up a camera, but he inspired the work of some of America`s greatest photographers.

``He developed his own vision of an encyclopedia of American images and carried it through various agencies. He knew how to arrange funding. He knew how to deal with people. That was his talent,`` says Larry Viskochil, curator of prints and photographs for the historical society.

The photography project married Stryker, an economics instructor turned New Dealer, to Standard Oil of New Jersey, a bastion of capitalism that suffered at the time from a floundering public image.

The company, forerunner to Exxon Corp., launched the photography project to show the public the human face of oil producers and consumers. With his characteristic visionary touch, Stryker gave Standard Oil thousands of faces in a far broader pictorial documentary.

Stryker`s view of documenting the oil industry encompassed ``anything that happened to use grease,`` one of his photographers quipped.

A snowbound ranch, a car lost in the mists of a country road, firefighters, gravediggers and, of course, children found their way to the Standard Oil files as Stryker sent his photographers along the back roads to small towns of oil-producing states and along the new highways to the oil boom towns and big cities.

Stryker, a political Populist who had taught at Columbia University, never lost the look of an academic with his shock of white hair and his thick bifocals.

``He was basically a teacher,`` says Esther Bubley, a free-lance photographer who works in New York City and joined the Standard Oil project when she was 23. ``He treated us all as if we were students. Everyone got a big, thick book on this country and its history. He tried to imbue everyone with a sense of history.``

geographic regions in photographic essays. He paid them $150 a week plus expenses, an enormous amount at the time.

The photographers took Stryker`s sense of history and social consciousness seriously, however. When photographer Harold Corsini went to the arctic oil fields for a 10-week stint, he spent the first month studying and talking to arctic experts.

Bubley spent five months in Texas and invested a lot of time in just getting to know the people before taking pictures in oil towns such as Tomball where the faces at the City Cafe, the Baptist Church and the prayer meeting VE Day present classic cameo shots of Americana.

Perhaps no single image captures the mood of the Standard Oil collection as well as Sol Libsohn`s 1944 photograph of a soldier on furlough, talking to a rapt audience of admirers, as he leans nonchalantly againt the doorway of the gas station and general store in Brown Summit, N.C.

Stryker came to the Standard Oil project after heading the legendary Farm Security Administration`s photographic documentary program in the 1930s and early 1940s.

At the FSA, Stryker sent giants of American photography that included Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans out to capture the ravages of the Depression on the American populace. At the FSA too, Stryker set his style for unflinching portrayals of the world as it is, and he carried the approach to Standard Oil. He applied it there by rewriting the script for industrial photography, which he described as too often attempting to make ``a silk purse out of a sow`s ear.``

Stryker`s team showed no aversion to photographing sweating men, dirt and smoke, some of it so dense that the buildings beyond are lost in the haze. Of course, such landscapes then represented progress in the public mind, not pollution, Viskichil notes.

But the photographers also brought back their share of scenic fields and sweeping countrysides.